Zanoni eBook

“No,” said the latter; “hadst thou
delayed the acceptance of the Arch-gift until thou
hadst attained to the years, and passed through all
the desolate bereavements that chilled and seared myself
ere my researches had made it mine, thou wouldst have
escaped the curse of which thou complainest now,—­thou
wouldst not have mourned over the brevity of human
affection as compared to the duration of thine own
existence; for thou wouldst have survived the very
desire and dream of the love of woman. Brightest,
and, but for that error, perhaps the loftiest, of
the secret and solemn race that fills up the interval
in creation between mankind and the children of the
Empyreal, age after age wilt thou rue the splendid
folly which made thee ask to carry the beauty and
the passions of youth into the dreary grandeur of earthly
immortality.”

“I do not repent, nor shall I,” answered
Zanoni. “The transport and the sorrow,
so wildly blended, which have at intervals diversified
my doom, are better than the calm and bloodless tenor
of thy solitary way—­thou, who lovest nothing,
hatest nothing, feelest nothing, and walkest the world
with the noiseless and joyless footsteps of a dream!”

“You mistake,” replied he who had owned
the name of Mejnour,—­“though I care
not for love, and am dead to every passion that
agitates the sons of clay, I am not dead to their
more serene enjoyments. I carry down the stream
of the countless years, not the turbulent desires of
youth, but the calm and spiritual delights of age.
Wisely and deliberately I abandoned youth forever
when I separated my lot from men. Let us not
envy or reproach each other. I would have saved
this Neapolitan, Zanoni (since so it now pleases thee
to be called), partly because his grandsire was but
divided by the last airy barrier from our own brotherhood,
partly because I know that in the man himself lurk
the elements of ancestral courage and power, which
in earlier life would have fitted him for one of us.
Earth holds but few to whom Nature has given the qualities
that can bear the ordeal. But time and excess,
that have quickened his grosser senses, have blunted
his imagination. I relinquish him to his doom.”

“And still, then, Mejnour, you cherish the desire
to revive our order, limited now to ourselves alone,
by new converts and allies. Surely—­surely—­thy
experience might have taught thee, that scarcely once
in a thousand years is born the being who can pass
through the horrible gates that lead into the worlds
without! Is not thy path already strewed with
thy victims? Do not their ghastly faces of agony
and fear—­the blood-stained suicide, the
raving maniac—­rise before thee, and warn
what is yet left to thee of human sympathy from thy
insane ambition?”